Comment Spam – does Akismet work?

A week ago I was receiving on average 10 spam comments a day. I had Akismet running and was more than happy that it was catching all the nasties for me. But while updating a few plugins I appear to have inadvertently turned Akismet off. I didn’t realised this until today when I received an email saying I had 1 comment awaiting moderation.

I logged in to check it out, but soon realised it was only spam — strange I thought, why hadn’t Akismet caught it. Then I realised the Akismet Spam Tab was missing and then I realised I must have accidentally turned it off — but wait a minute I thought — why have I only received 1 spam comment in the last week when Akismet is turned off?

My brain is still trying to work this out, but I appear to have received more spam while Akismet was turned on. That can’t be right? Can it? I am going to turn it back on and see what happens — but I must confess I don’t have it running some of my other sites, and interestingly they hardly ever get any spam.

A question I’d like to ask is — has anybody else noticed anything weird with Akismet? Do you use it? Or perhaps some other spam catching method?